Joy is a politicized form of pleasure that goes beyond gratification to challenge norms of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Kristie Soares focuses on the diasporic media of Puerto Rico and Cuba to examine how music, public activist demonstrations, social media, sitcoms, and other areas of culture resist the dominant stories told about Latinx joy. As she shows, Latinx creators compose versions of joy central to social and political struggle and at odds with colonialist and imperialist narratives that equate joy with political docility and a lack of intelligence. Soares builds her analysis around chapters that delve into gozando in salsa music, precise joy among the New Young Lords Party, choteo in the comedy ¿Qué Pasa U.S.A.?, azúcar in the life and death of Celia Cruz, dale as Pitbull’s signature affect, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s use of silliness to take seriously political violence.

Daring and original, Playful Protest examines how Latinx creators resist the idea that joy only exists outside politics and activist struggle.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Dancing in My Parents’ Living Room and Other Stories About Joy

1. Gozando: Gendered Discourses of Pleasure in Early Salsa
2. Precise Joy: The Gendered Performance of Affect in the Young Lords Party
3. Choteo and the Family Sitcom: Poking Fun at Cuban Masculinities in ¿Qué Pasa U.S.A.?
4. Dancing with Death: Celia Cruz’s Azúcar and Queer of Color Survival
5. Dale: Queer Racialized Excess in Pitbull’s Miami

Coda    Politicized Silliness in a Time of Crisis: Notes on Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Notes

Bibliography

Index